People & Places

Best Place to Go Stoned Miami 2010 - Neptune Memorial Reef

Everyone smokes in cemeteries. It's an age-old rite of passage for any pothead. You toke, take a seat on someone's grave, and let your chemically deranged brain trip on the exasperating enigmas of human existence. The Neptune Memorial Reef, however, is some genuinely next-level shit. Located three and a quarter miles off Key Biscayne, the reef is an actual underwater necropolis where real-deal dead people's cremated remains lie encased in enormous concrete vessels shaped like giant seashells, starfish, and chunks of coral. With plans to eventually occupy 16 acres of ocean floor and house 125,000 human bodies, this deep-sea burial ground is still in its early stages. Right now, there are only 1,200 plots covering approximately one and a half acres. But even so, the whole thing looks like a mythical sunken city filled with architectural ruins (arches, columns, gates) and gargantuan, algae-encrusted sculptural monuments (a five-ton lion, for example), all of it populated by weird sea creatures including tangs, triggers, eels, and stingrays. Find this stoner mecca by boat, or ride there on Poseidon's thigh — the GPS coordinates are N25° 42.036, W80° 05.409 — then sink 45 feet to the ocean floor. A cremation and Neptune Memorial Reef placement package costs $4,000. But it's totally open and free to divers. So get your scuba certification. Hit that spliff. Touch the afterlife.